The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients

"If the history of human experimentation tells us anything, from the bloody vivisections of the first millennium to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study," says investigative journalist Sonia Shah (Crude: The Story of Oil) here, "it is that such burdens made secret will fall heaviest on the poorest and most powerless among us." Shah documents how the pharmaceutical industry is using testing procedures in the global South that would cause scandals in the developed world. In India, for example, dozens of patients in drug trials have perished suffering deadly side effects known to the FDA, while in Zambia, AIDS babies in clinical trials have been administered placebos.

"It is critical that those engaged in drug development ... research ethics, and policy know about these stories."—New England Journal of Medicine